Table Talk with AA Gill: L’Arpège, Paris

Our restaurant critic returns to the French capital, a city where he first learnt to eat and has an abiding and unrequited love for

Paris. I haven’t been to Paris for years. I haven’t been on purpose. I’m not
talking to Paris.

Every spring, when the air is chilly and the sky blue, and the oysters are
turning creamy, and the little Mont Saint Michel salt lamb and the early
chèvre are on their way, and the scent of gariguette strawberries fills the
air, I make a point of not going to Paris.

I don’t go again in the autumn, when the fruit is too heavy for the bough, and
the capons lie like pale odalisques, and the mushrooms smell of sullied
sheets.

I don’t go because I have an abiding and unrequited love for Paris. It was
where I first learnt to eat; where I was first moved to speechless tears by
art. I would catch the midnight train from Victoria and arrive on the Left
Bank as the streets were being flushed